Euchre

Where you have plastic surfaces, or some types of paint surfaces, and dust is clinging to them from static charge (not good around a computer anyway), use a dryer sheet to wipe the dust off. It'll work amazingly well. This is also handy if you do case mods on plastic parts with a dremel tool - the little plastic bits tend to become very staticy and cling to everything. The dryer sheet makes them come loose and they tend to get snagged up and trapped in the sheet very well.

Except that every tire manufacturer, automaker, and the TIA (Tire Industry Association) disagree, for a good, demonstrable reason. In less than ideal traction, you don't want your rear tires to slide before the fronts, and sliding tires pass gripping ones. Brand new tread on front and worn on rear means the rear slides around the front, and around you go.

Firestone being best? That's a new one to me. I've tended to like Yokohama and Cooper, the former has become pretty expensive, though. As for mismatched tires, it depends on the vehicle and how you use it. If you have AWD, your tires need to be a matched set, especially due to size being less than 2% different. If you have a FWD or RWD, axles must have matched sets if you expect reliable performance above 35mph. If you tool around town in your beater, never breaking 40mph, run 4 different half used up tires until you pop one on yet another pothole. I had 4 different tires on a FWD compact when I was young, and they all broke traction differently under hard cornering, which meant it wiggled oddly under such driving conditions. Also, new tires with the best tread always go on the back. Braking traction matters way more than accelerating traction.

Actually, SCSI was used heavily in server systems, and Sun systems. It was a very robust technology compared to IDE (PATA), but wasn't as cheap. For most consumer users, IDE was adequate and much more affordable. Apple has always like long term durability, despite what some would have you believe. Says someone with robust, affordable internet access. The store where I work sells a LOT of physical media still, exactly because of this. Affluent urbanites love to act like everyone has the fortune of great access, which they have due to market density offering great profitability, and mock those who don't. It is still faster to ship physical media than use the internet to move large amounts of data. I'd bet if you put it to the test, a truckload of Blurays can get more content moved cheaper and faster than streaming an equal number of instances of the same content over the available internet connections.

Aha! Mismatched gain is not good, because it will amplify very extremely modest noises like that. In general, you shouldn't amplify an already amplified signal. If the headphones use batteries, you should use (or possibly set the jack to) a line level output, so you can use the headphone volume control. If that isn't an option, Set Windows volume to half, then test the volume range on the headphones. If the hum or other distortions start to happen in the top quarter of the headphone volume range, adjust the Windows volume to 25% and try again. Once you can cleanly use the full headphone volume control range, leave the Windows volume there. Even if the headphones do not use their own power, this is a good method.

May sound odd, but be sure the jack is snapped in all the way, and check for clearance issues that may be preventing the plug from seating fully. There's a lot of tolerance issues possible with 3.5mm jacks and plugs, and if the tip is not fully seated, you can get ground loop issues. The variance in sound that relates to load suggests that the fans are creating the most of the RF noise being inducted, if not via the ground load, then directly out from the fan or headers. Again, be sure they're all plugged in fully, and that they are spinning freely. If fan wires are anywhere near the header for the 3.5mm plug, move them away. Same is true even for the sound processing chip (whichever one is handling it) itself, so if it is integrated into your video card, be sure the wires are routed away from that, too.

The thing I think Apple should keep doing that already sets itself apart is the long term support of their devices. Even though Apple releases new devices every year like clockwork, and a new version of their OSs every year in the same fashion, most of their devices will enjoy 5 years of usable lifespan in terms of being supported to run current software, and receive security updates, and often more like 7 years or even 10 years. Microsoft and Google are both slipping into a pattern of 'rapid release' that is coming along with rapid obsolescence. When an Android phone bought new last year, with an OS no more than a year old when the device was introduced, no longer supports a current app, that's just ridiculous. Windows isn't quite so terrible yet, but MS has been putting a lot of pressure on enterprise to up the pace of migration to new OSs. Enterprise deployment is the only thing that's kept MS from shortening support spans to as little as 1 year for basic functionality. They are already basically reaching that level with anything Windows 10 - being told the long delayed build I got earlier in the year will soon be 'obsolete' is absurdly stupid. Apple's recent adoption of the USB-C connector for the iPad Pro bodes well for returning to something Apple was actually starting to do quite well; use open standards. Apple ditched proprietary ADB for USB and Firewire (IEEE1394), abandoned proprietary floppy disks in favor of standard optical media, and abandoned their proprietary display ports in favor of VGA, DisplayPort, and HDMI. If they would drop Lightning (since they missed the chance to open it up to everyone, which would've precluded most of the need and motivation to develop USB-C), there would be no hardware compatibility issue to handling peripherals and other connectivity and charging. Apple would then be left to weeding out the proprietary software implementations, like their goofy Air Drop supplanting a proper Bluetooth stack for file transfers. It would be so nice to just BT a pic from an iPhone to an Android phone, or a contact (vcard), or any other file. I know they understand the common BT standards - their implementation of BT audio is surprisingly effective. Oh, and may he rest in peace, Steve Jobs is dead - can we get past the 'bag of hurt' and have the option of a Bluray drive in a Mac? It has been long enough, it could even be a 4K Bluray player.

How? What vector? Malicious ads? This is a big part of why ad blocking is so popular. Email? There's your safe practices right there. Software? Be careful and mindful of where you get software, another safe practice. I haven't seen a story about a worm (self propagating software) in a very long time, and never one that brings ransomware. Every single example I've ever seen or heard of, of someone getting ransomware, was from something they had to take action to install. Windows Update hasn't delivered it yet (and heaven help them if they did), and it is extremely unlikely it will. The one most consistent way that malware has to get into a system isn't exploiting a machine passively, it relies on social engineering - hacking the human - to get the malicious code in place. Contravention of malware that can propagate itself directly (worms) is far too easy to block at the infrastructural level, and the whole of the IT industry is heavily invested in doing so. Those malicious ads I spoke of before? Major, reputable ad services are constantly on the lookout for malicious ads, so they can remove them and block the advertisers from using their services. If they didn't, they'd be prime targets for something scarier than malware - lawyers.

Open Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Escape to do so quickly), click More Details at bottom left if you don't have tabs already showing across the top. Click the Performance tab, then the Memory mini graph on the left, to show the full graph on the right. In the bottom bar graph, mouse over the bar sections and you'll get an idea how your memory is being allocated. Windows has been designed to use more and more free RAM to cache things for faster loading time and responsiveness, so you may have a lot of that going on. Being 25% of your available RAM, this is not surprising - that allows for many common components to be ready to access quickly, yet still leaves a great deal of memory free. If you are concerned about the allocations, you may want to check into some tweaking guides for what you can disable to prevent so much caching and shut down background services and apps that may be adding to the used RAM.

Or maybe practice other safe computing practices better. Most malware people get is still from operator error. Clicking links, going to sites or doing things on the computer that are higher risk, and without adequate protections, things like that. If you do backups and use the right disciplines, your biggest issue is that things will take longer.

You've done a heap on the best gaming PCs (laptop and desktop) and even gaming phones - how about the best gaming tablet? Using the Switch devices would be cheating, and don't forget there are Windows tablets, not just Android and iOS.

As cool as this is, I wouldn't recommend someone thinking they could easily 'counterhack' someone. Back in the days of Yahoo chat, a couple of the tech oriented rooms often had folks asking for help to 'learn to hack' so they could 'hack their hacker back'. The vast majority of the time, they were either dealing with someone WAY beyond their skill level, and likely to remain that way, or just someone they knew that could predict their actions and even possibly had physical access to their hardware, although they'd claim nobody could possibly be in that position that would 'hack' them. (Most of the latter were really just script kiddies.) In this case, they just managed to get the wrong target, like the guy that stole or bought Zoz's stolen Mac.

Almost 20 years ago, I took a motherboard with a bad hard drive controller (murdered every HD I connected to it) and made a CD boot only system out of it, with components that generally worked in every Linux distro of the time. I had a collection of live CD distros to run on it. I was fully an adult, but I wouldn't be surprised if some kid somewhere was doing the same thing. I know I've heard of kids using live distros to get around being locked out of their computers, without leaving any trace.

So how much does that all cost? Nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and hospitals have long used bed alarms and chair alarms to monitor patients and residents, hoping to avoid falls and injuries. Recent studies concluded that they actually happened more in facilities that used them, because staff didn't pay attention to them, and the alarm just tells them the accident has already happened. As a result, such devices are being abandoned and removed from use. They were already relatively cheap in terms of medical devices, often ~$100 each. Now they aren't as precise as devices based on load cells or strain gauges, but do you really need more than a toggle switched signal? I'd suspect as they fall from use, their prices will only drop. Just a bit of hacking and you've got something that puts out a simple voltage signal for your presence sensor. How about that? Maybe you've already got an Arduino or Pi with a sensor board or input you can utilize? Something to consider.

I was thinking about this today, but not in the narrow sense of "What OS do you use on your computer?", but "What OSes do you use every day?", considering all devices you use of any kind. In my case, I started adding up things, and it got interesting. On computers, on an every day basis, I use Windows 10 Home (my 2 laptops), Windows XP and Vista (at work, embedded and kiosks), ChromeOS (demos at work), and Android (tablets at home and work, old repurposed phone to media player, handheld scanner at work). On a 'some days' basis, I use Windows 7 on my lady's laptop and her work computer. Maybe once a month, I use Ubuntu (forget which build, it is older on an old laptop), Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and 2000. Where it gets really interesting, though is the 'not exactly a computer' devices. My cell phone isn't considered a smartphone, but it isn't just super barebones firmware either - it runs BrewOS. The Amazon ecosystem devices we have are basically all FireOS, which is based on Android. My Vizio TV (pre-'Chromecast built in') I'm not totally sure of, although it appears to be Android based, but at very least uses a Linux kernel. I don't exactly know what runs the DVRs, or my LG 4K Bluray player, or my old Sylvania Bluray player, but I know that Bluray players at least started out using Java heavily for their functionality. We have a lot more software running our lives than we often realize, from many disparate sources.

When it's that bad, they just fall over dead. When their bodies are found, nobody understands what caused it, so nobody has complained.

This is quite reminiscent of the debate (fuss?) over the validity of Nürburgring lap times of high end sports cars and tuner variants of cars. It is biased toward very track oriented vehicles, and not a vehicle that is comfortable in day to day types of use. However, that's really about the exact versions used for the lap times. The more common versions perform very well, even if they couldn't post the same times. So, it is a valid way to make an overall comparison, but saying your exact version of said vehicle isn't valid. This is basically just the computer version of that.

Sure, because the screen is literally less than half the diagonal size of a normal laptop, let alone less than a third the diagonal size of a normal desktop screen.

Plug a phone into a keyboard to replace your laptop or desktop? See the Motorola Atrix. No, they don't make those anymore. Nobody cared. Want to recreate the effect yourself? Put your phone in a charging easel (you can charge wirelessly, right), connect a keyboard via Bluetooth, and cast to a display. Go ahead, do it. You'll find it goes about as well as things did with the Atrix. Now, there are some people that do this kind of thing, but it is pretty rare. Most people can't be bothered to do it, because it doesn't really give you the laptop or desktop experience, or because they don't feel a need to leave the all in the hand experience they already have. I wanted to like the idea of the Atrix, and of 'docking' a smartphone to act as a laptop or even desktop replacement, but it just doesn't really suit. Maybe some day someone will find a way to make it work gracefully, but we're not there yet.

When you say '2 routers', does one of them have your modem built into it? That'd make it a gateway, and you could daisy chain a regular router off of one of the wired ports on the gateway to the uplink port on the router. After that, how you configure things determines how easily devices on the tiers of network can speak to each other.

Princess Luna that sounds great, but if you then open Windows Event Viewer, is the log going to be a solid scroll of errors as Windows tries ad nauseam to restart Cortana? That might be as bad on CPU cycles as Cortana itself.

I shouldn't have to manually delete a folder or dummy an executable to shut off a surveillance process on my computer. Since Cortana and Search are now once again divided, why can't I just gracefully, by design, be able to shut down the process entirely as a part of disabling the use of Cortana? Uninstalling it completely would be nice too, but I can see where maybe, some day, it could become useful and effective. Alexa is a nosy hag, but at least she does things for me, like turn on or off my LED lights and pause and resume my DVR playback when I want to hit the bathroom. Come on MS, just give us a real option here! Oh, and about that Tux and 'join the Dark Side' - light saber should be red if Tux is the Dark Side, not green.

Try Microsoft Bob some time.

If you can get to where you can see the guts of the retractor, and you've cleaned all the gunk out of it, lube the mechanism with a lighter lubricant like WD40 or other penetrating oil first, and if that makes it retract more quickly again, chase that lube with some spray grease and work it in a bit. The light oils will work their way out fairly quickly, but when followed with the heaver spray grease, they'll actually help draw the grease into the mechanism, which will hold up longer.

Can't say I'm totally enthralled with all of your aesthetic elements, but the concept and what I see of the fabrication looks brilliant. Looks like something that you'd want to tear down a dirt trail in the southwest with, assuming there might be a skid pan under it.